Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...

Climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We calibrate a multigenerational model with education, physical capital, knowledge and...

Whether or not to vaccinate one's child is a decision that a parent may approach in several ways. The vaccination game, in which parents must choose whether to vaccinate a child against a disease, is one with positive externalities (herd immunity). In some societies, not vaccinating is an...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the â??flypaper...

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an...

The case for progressive income taxation is often based on the classic result of Jakobsson (1976) and Fellman (1976), according to which progressive and only progressive income taxes - in the sense of increasing average tax rates on income-ensure a reduction in income inequality. This result has...

The case for progressive income taxation is often based on the classic result of Jakobsson (1976) and Fellman (1976), according to which progressive and only progressive income taxes - in the sense of increasing average tax rates on income - ensure a reduction in income inequality. This result...

Quasilinear preferences on a public good and a numeraire good are limits of preferences where both goods are normal. The set of equilibria of the voluntary contribution (or private provision) game is easily characterized under quasilinearity by: top valuators aggregately contribute their common...

Various experimental procedures aimed at measuring individual risk aversion involve a list of pairs of alternative prospects. We first study the widely used method by Holt and Laury (2002), for which we find that the removal of some items from the lists yields a systematic decrease in risk...

How should the benefits of the commons, say a publicly owned fishing resource, be distributed? A first possibility is equal division among the population. A second option is to distribute them among the people who actually exploit the resource in proportion to their activity level: this is the...